Familiar
Name Ranks At TopOf
Early Draft RankingsIn
the 48-year life of Major League Baseball’s first-year player
draft, the son of a former big leaguer has been selected with the No.
1 pick overall on only one occasion. That came in 1987, when the
Seattle Mariners chose Ken Griffey Jr.
That
rare occurrence could happen again in 2015—on the 50th anniversary of the draft—when outfielder Daz Cameron, an outfielder
from Eagles Landing High in McDonough, Ga., becomes eligible. He
ranks No. 1 on Perfect Game’s recent ranking of the nation’s best
high-school sophomores, and ranks No. 1 on PG’s list of the Top
200 Prospects in the Draft Class of 2015.
Cameron
is the 16-year-old son of former Gold Glove outfielder Mike Cameron,
who hit .249 with 278 home runs in a 17-year big-league career that
ended in 2011.
Perfect
Game Vice President of Player Personnel David Rawnsley has seen the younger Cameron
play on a number of occasions and has little doubt that the 6-foot,
185-pound outfielder is a legitimate candidate to be selected first
overall two years from now.
“Daz
has as much hitting talent at his age as I've ever seen,” Rawnsley
says. “He is very mechanically polished and has beautiful hitting
mechanics. At our World Underclass (in Fort Myers, Fla.) in late
December, as a 15-year-old, he hit seven straight balls off the
Monster at Fenway South, which might have been the best BP in PG
history.
“He's
very strong right now and the ball explodes off his bat, and he's
obviously not done growing. He's handled high-velocity game pitching
already without issue. He was basically born to hit genetically and
his dad is doing all the right things to develop him, including
retire at the right time.”
Cameron
may not be quite as gifted athletically as his father—or for that
matter Griffey, who went on to a Hall of Fame career—but should end
up with at least 6.7 speed in the 60 and throw well enough to settle
into right field at the pro level.
The
2015 college crop, by contrast, does not have an obvious candidate to
challenge Cameron for the top spot, but should begin to sort itself
out today with the beginning of the 2013 NCAA Division I baseball
season. Vanderbilt righthander Walker Buehler, an unsigned 14thround
pick of the Pittsburgh Pirates in last year’s draft, ranks as the
top college prospect on the accompanying list.

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